RUMI (1207-1273). Mohammed b. Mohammed b. Husain albalkhi, better known as Maulana Jalal-uddin Rumi (or simply Jalal-uddin), the greatest Sac poet of Persia, was born on Sept. 3o, 1207 ( 604 A.H. 6th of Rabi` I.) at Balkh, in Khorasan. His father was invited to Iconium (or Rum), and from this place Jalal-uddin took his pen-name.
Jalal-uddin founded the order of the Maulawi (Mevlevi) der vishes, famous for their piety as well as for their garb of mourn ing, their music and their mystic dance (sama), which is the outward representation of the circling movement of the spheres, and the inward symbol of the circling movement of the soul caused by the vibrations of a Sufi's fervent love to God. Most of Rtimi's matchless odes were composed in honour of the Maulawi dervishes, and even his opus magnum, the Mathnawi (Mesnevi), or, as it is usually called, The Spiritual Mathnawi in six books with 30,00o to 40,000 double rhymed verses, can be traced to the same source. The idea of this immense collection of ethical and moral precepts was first suggested to the poet by his favourite disciple Hasan, better known as Husam-uddin, who in 1258 became Jalal-uddin's chief assistant. Jalal-uddin dictated to him, with a short interruption, the whole work during the remaining years of his life. Soon after its completion Jalal-uddin died, on Dec. 17, 1273.
Jalal-uddin's life is fully described in Shams-uddin Ahmed Aflaki's Mandkib-ul `drifin (written between A.D. 1318 and 1353), the most important portions of which have been translated by J. W. Red house in the preface to his English metrical version of The Mesnevi, Book the First (London, 1881) ; there is also an abridged translation of the Mathnawi, with introduction on Sufism, by E. H. Whinfield
(2nd ed., 1898). Complete editions have been printed in Bombay, Lucknow, Tabriz, Constantinople and in Bulaq (with a Turkish translation, 1268 A.H.), at the end of which a seventh daftar is added, the genuineness of which is refuted by a remark of Jalal-uddin himself in one of the Bodleian copies of the poem, Ouseley, 294 (f. 328a seq.). A revised edition was made by (Abd-ullatif between 1024 and 1032 A.11., and the same author's commentary on the Mathnawi, Lata'if-ulma'nawi, and his glossary, Lat(elf-allughat, have been lithographed in Cawnpore (1876) Lucknow (1877) respec tively, the latter under the title Farhang-z-mathnawi. For the other numerous commentaries and for further biographical and literary par ticulars of Jalal-uddin, see Rieu's Cat. of the Persian MSS. of the Brit. Mus., vol. ii. p. 584 seq.; A. Sprenger's Oudh Cat., p. Sir Gore Ouseley, Notices of Persian Poets, p. 112 seq.; H. Ethe, in Morgenldndische Studien (Leipzig, 187o), p. 95 seq., and in Geiger and Kuhn's Grundriss der iranischen Philologie Stuttgart, 1896-1904), vol. ii. pp. Selections from Jalal-uddin's diwan (often styled Diwein-i-Shams-i-Tabriz) are translated in German verse by V. von Rosenzweig (Vienna, 1838) ; into English by R. A. Nicholson (2nd ed., 1898) and W. Hastie (1903).